Hello. Hope to find an answer to this little problem of mine.I sometimes run Ableton Live 8.2 on a Samsung laptop (windows 8 64bit). When playing above around 10 tracks with effects ecc (without "freezing" them) the CPU load indicator tends to go over 100% and everything is messed up. The bottleneck of this computer is clearly the CPU: it's and AMD A6 4455 "trinity"(dual core). It's clearly not a great processor but it's still brand new and I thought it could handle some more stress by Ableton.Now, my question is:

Would an external sound card help taking off some CPU stress when processing audio? (Maybe dedicated drivers instead of Asio4all might help?)

In that case, what kind of external sound card should I buy? (I'd like to buy one anyways)

To address the original question - No, a new sound card by itself won't reduce CPU load. While you may be able to get a high-end model that can do its own reverb and EQ, this only "reduces CPU load" in the sense that you would disable those effects in Ableton and do them in the sound card instead. But I'm guessing you're working with more than reverb and EQ.

At first glance, my gut feeling is that your hardware simply isn't powerful enough. I don't keep a close eye on new CPU benchmarks, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but - isn't the A6 a netbook-class low-wattage CPU? Mobile CPUs have come a long way, and they're perfectly adequate for what 90% of people do with a computer. The problem is that you're in the 10%. Doing multitrack audio editing and effects in real time requires power to spare.

Personally I'd go for a desktop system. You can certainly get powerful laptops, but the advantages of a desktop system are multitudinous. Cooling systems are better, there's more flexibility for upgrades later on, and a better ratio of bang to buck. IMO you should only be looking at a laptop if there's a real reason you need the portability, like if you're going to be doing shows on a regular basis. (Even still, a desktop computer doesn't take any longer to set up than a couple of turntables or tube amps...)

I thought this had been addressed already, but I guess I wasn't clear enough. No, the A6 is not a "netbook-class" CPU like an Atom or Brazos. It is a low power chip with a Trinity core. While it has some performance reduction due to a lower clock speed and less cache, it has the same core design as AMDs current high end bulldozer chips. It's not top of the line by any means, but it's no slouch and much faster than the "netbook-class" CPUs.